Counting Breaths
by Serrafina
Summary: Kara can’t think of anything she’s ever had eighty-five of, and certainly nothing she’s ever had to lose. No spoilers


Title: Counting Breaths

Written for the remix challenge at bsghiatusthon on livejournal.

Original Story: "The Lost Adventurers, My Peers" by daangel729

Disclaimer: Don't own 'em.

Summary: Kara thinks about Helo (miniseries through You Can't Go Home Again).

Thanks to tracyj23 for the beta!

* * *

_How many did we lose?_

_Eighty-five._

_...heard about Captain Adama..._

_Any word on Sharon?_

Right.

Eight-five dead. Eighty-five. Eight Five. Four score and five. Kara can't think of anything she's ever had eighty-five of, and certainly nothing she's ever had to lose. It's a huge number, exponential, clogging in her throat and her veins so she can't think, can't feel, and it's all she can do to turn tail and march through the halls as though she frakking owns them.

Right.

She tries not to look around the hallways and see eighty-five people that aren't there, tries not to anxiously scan every weary face for the people she once knew, Ripper and Horseshoe and the entire frakking squadron. _Sharon, Lee and Helo, godsdammit, Helo! _

She feels claustrophobic, crowded in on all sides by people that aren't there. While she's used to being alone and living with ghosts, there are too many faces and numbers and eighty-five seems so frakking huge but there's another number, a bigger number, that she can't even contemplate because there just isn't room enough to breathe with all the dead people.

Right.

Breathe. Live. They're not, they won't, and she probably won't either because she'll hop back in the cockpit and with so many good people dead, it's about time her number came up.

* * *

As long as she's thinking in numbers, she might as well try to quantify her losses, she tells herself. Most everyone on Galactica knows she's got history with the Adamas, but what surprises even her is that she met Karl C. Agathon in a noisy bar four blocks from campus years before she met either brother.

_She punched him in the face before she ever said a word to him. It was an accident; she was a little drunk and he was a little in the way, but then he just shook his head and straightened up so that he towered over her._

"_Karl," he said, holding out his hand._

"_Kara," she replied, and it was all ridiculous anyway because what the frak was she doing making nice with a stranger and what the frak was he doing shaking hands with this mad woman? Neither of them had a call-sign yet to hide behind, which was probably just as well. He never would've admitted to his real name if he could help it, and once she was Starbuck there was no turning back._

_After the serendipity of their first meeting, Kara and Karl started finding each other everywhere at the Academy, and it wasn't too long before she was coaching him in the sims and he was coaching her in just about everything else, including the art of staying out of the brig when it mattered (when it didn't, they usually ended up sharing a cell)._

_Their friendship was the strongest she'd ever known, although he seemed to be best friends with everybody on campus. But he knew that she wasn't and he stuck around her more often and that pissed her off but she kinda liked it anyway._

Now it's years later and she's counting breaths like cubits and trying not to think about ... just trying not to think because Apollo got himself blown up and normally this is where Helo would show up unasked but not necessarily unwanted. He wouldn't hold her while she cried because she's Starbuck and that would be stupid, but she might get a little drunk or a little angry and maybe she'd hit him or maybe she'd say something dangerous, but then he would wrap her in his arms and hold her to his chest and she might struggle but only to cover the fact that secretly she liked having him around.

But none of that matters anymore, none of that's ever going to happen, not now and not ever again, because Helo flew off with Sharon (he was stupid in love with her) and they're not coming back.

She keeps counting breaths. Eighty-five, eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight … keeps going.

* * *

Lee says "hey" and pulls her to her feet, and it's down to eighty-seven; then Sharon comes back with a Raptor full of strangers, and it's down to eighty-six, but the number won't budge from there.

* * *

They have a memorial, for eighty-five-six and eighty billion, and she's painfully glad that Sharon's standing with the Chief, and Lee Adama is standing by her side, stiff and awkward and painful as ever. But he's close enough to touch if she ever reached out, and that knowledge alone is so wonderful that she resists the urge.

But even as she feels stupidly, wretchedly grateful for her friend by her side, she can't forget her other friend who's never let her down until Sharon left him behind on Caprica. And sometimes the unbelievableness of it all chokes her up inside and she struggles against the anger at Sharon for coming back with a Raptor full of _not-_Helo; but she always trips over her own guilty conscience and thinks, once again, that those eighty-five, eighty-six, and billions more could've switched places with her and the universe would be the better for it. After all, what does she know about living?

* * *

She tries not to think about Helo in the weeks that follow, but she can't help noticing the moments that never happen.

She's stopped counting, measuring her life in CAPs and kills and near-misses. She is too tired to miss anyone, and it seems unnatural to be glad they aren't going through the same hell.

One day she really almost gets herself killed, and she tells herself it wasn't on purpose, but even _she_ isn't sure as she ejects from a dying ship and hurtles through the atmosphere to a barren moon.

Something keeps her going down there, and something makes her pull her own ass out of the fire and high-tail it back to the sort-of-welcoming arms of the fleet. She's not sure what it is, but for one desperate, oxygen-deprived moment in the belly of the Cylon Raider, she thinks that something goes by the name Karl C. Agathon.


End file.
